Name Origin (a humorous tale)

A story unto itself, I designed and built this 3-wheel electric handicap vehicle in 1985 while attending Night College and the experience launched me into a really spectacular opportunity at this taking-the-world-by-storm toy company called "Worlds Of Wonder" (WOW) in Fremont California. With just a 5 minute interview I captured the job as one of the lead Design Engineers specifically responsible for LazerTag Rifle®, in addition to cost-reduction of Teddy Ruxpin®, production-design of Julie®, and Project Engineering on Little Boppers®. A year later this awesome company is about to tank due to corporate malfeasance.

A melting pot of amazing talent, many of us hatched plans for future collaboration. During WOWs liquidation, the proverbial water cooler in Engineering becomes our social well. One guy says to the group "Hey, what are you going to do when you grow up?" which is pretty funny coming from youthful adults that enjoy designing high-tech toys. One person says "I'm going to do this and this" and another says "I'm doing that and that". Then the guy turns to me and asks "Hey Alan, what are you going to do when you grow up?" In truth – I am literally days away from filing the business license and I say "Well, I want my own company, invent neat cool stuff, and have a blast". The guy says "Wow! Got a name for that company?" and I said no… Then he quips "How about… 'Hords Of Fun'?" and everyone busts up on the inside joke: "Worlds Of Wonder", "Hords Of Fun" (HOF) - and I run with it.

Coming from WOW, HOF has instant street-cred because we could display product we created in hand. Plus we started out on the cutting edge by creating toys using AutoCAD instead of drawing with pencils on boards, and we also had the best pen plotter offered by Hewlett-Packard which brought in quite a bit of service. Coincidentally knowing how to build computers also helped extend opportunity. This led to programming, 3D modeling, and animation using 3D Studio. In 1993 Redmond Washington was fertile ground just as Windows 3.1 hit the market: Our first job at Microsoft was converting their AutoCAD drawings from vector to raster formats, and they taught how to program MultiMedia Viewer using Word RTF language. The next year I taught myself HTML and SQL, begetting a new chapter in Engineering Design for years to come.

Today, though primarily a software-centric company, we keep active on electromechanical design particularly with regards to electric bikes for which I have a rather profound affinity given the origin of how this all got started.

Legend

A brief history of my favorite projects as Hords Of Fun:

1988: Won an exclusive contract at DoE Sandia National Laboratory at the Combustion Research Facility in Livermore to provide engineering CAD services lasting 3 years, and included a special contract to build, supply, & support high-speed AutoCAD workstations to field technicians.

1993: Founded Cyber Interactive and created "CyberManager": The first multimedia file manager that could also play and view 25 multimedia formats; this grabs attention of Microsoft and leads to more interesting contracts.

1996: Invented the first "TreeControl" on the Internet: Attached with Visual C++ Marketing as their first webmaster, created and deployed the first ActiveX control outside the IE Team in June & demonstrated utility during Dev Days at Moscone Center Fan Francisco, revolutionizing presentation of information ala File-Manager-On-The-Web for the first time. Internally at Microsoft, HHelp used my code to fix and ship their product.

1997: Poached from Visual C++, my new role is Technical Program Manager at Microsoft's Reference Business Unit in charge of architecting common controls for Bookshelf. Encarta, & Virtual Globe unifying them into one Suite for the first time.

1997-2005: Invented Online Provisioning and Registration for Beer Competitions. This web application went through a significant rewrite & performance enhancement when .NET was released & was a great hit with the HomeBrew community resulting in having a seat at the Best of Show table at the World’s Largest Beer Competition 2 years in a row.

1999-2001: First Deployment Engineer hired into WebTV, now called MSTV after Microsoft acquisition. Responsible for customization of Server, Client Set-Top Box, Remote Control, and UI + plus training for all new engineering hires.

2004-2007: Attached to Microsoft Terminal Services Team for various roles, including SDE, Webmaster, and Builder: Responsible for hardware architecture and assembly of the fastest build lab of the time at Microsoft. Responsible for the UI of TS Web Access on Windows Server 2008.

2011: Architect & Developer attached to TBWA\Chiat-Day Los Angeles responsible for harvesting daily Analytics of the Nissan Infinity website using various sources and merging them into SQL for reporting with Tableau.